About 50,000 now live in Downtown

One of the most eagerly awaited discoveries from the 2010 census (at least for me) is to find out how many people actually live in the Downtown neighborhoods after more than a decade of intense in-movement. Yet go figure — it took me more than a week to finally sit down with the number crunching done by Eric Richardson at Blogdowntown. Some highlights of what he found:

• Downtown grew by about 15,000 in the 2000s, to reach roughly 51,000, give or take due to where the census tract lines fall. Adding in Chinatown swells the number by about 8,000 more. Bottom line: Downtown is now a moderately sized Los Angeles community, about as populous as Encino, Winnetka or Highland Park were in 2000. That's bigger than Los Feliz or Silver Lake, but smaller than San Pedro, Reseda or Sherman Oaks — and a lot smaller than 2000 leaders South Los Angeles or Hollywood.
• The Historic Core, bounded by 2nd, 9th, Hill and Los Angeles streets, more than doubled to 8,312 residents.
• The Arts District / Industrial District east of Alameda between the 101 and the 10 has 2,957 residents.

Richardson also looked at the population of City Council districts, with an eye toward the redistricting that will be necessary to bring all 15 to about 252,841 residents. Council President Eric Garcetti's 13th district is due to pick up area, Councilman Dennis Zine's in the West Valley is due to shrink some. He digs up some of the intense politicking from the last time around.